Reeder Iphone-On The Edge!

I spend quite a lot of my commute time consuming content from the internet on the iPhone. Its the time I spend reading my subscribed feeds. If you came here looking for reviews of feed reader apps to consider, I used to be a Feedly user for while and then I switched to Reeder and have never looked for a replacement. Please feel free to read my review of the earlier version here. In fact I spend an easy 8 to 10 hours using the app every week, and I think thats a lot of attention just for one app on the iPhone. That just shows how good the app experience is.

Last week the Reeder app was updated to version 3.0 which i wanted to review here. Since Shawn has already done an awesome work reviewing it here rather very elaborately, I will link to him and save myself some time.

In brief the Reeder app is awesome as ever, with a few feature enhancements. The New design gives a little more mature feel to the app while the animations give it a little more polish. All I wish now was if the app could use the full screen space just like how Instapaper on the iPhone does, by slowly hiding the tools bar and the status bar after a few seconds to make use of the Full Screen for the content on the iPhone.

It’s known that I am an avid Feedly user on desktop and mobile . These day’s I am just using Feedly on the desktop and I switched to Reeder for my mobile needs, and here are a few reasons why I can’t live with out Reeder these days.

Simplicity:- It’s layout is out right simple, and intuitive. Nothing closely compares to the simplicity of the app. It hardly takes a few minutes to get used to the app. The app feels snappy and all the content is delivered just right to suit the mobile device (iPhone/iPad). I love the layout on both iPhone and the iPad.

Google reader sync:- Syncing to Google reader is mandatory for me, since I have more than 100 odd hand picked feed subscriptions on Google reader. Reeder syncs with Google reader, once you setup your Google account, it just Works.

Offline:- The killer feature which forced me to keep looking for a better Feed reader for the iPhone was the ability to download all the feeds for use offline and sync back the changes when I am back online. My commute to work takes about 3 hours everyday and catch up on the feeds during my commute. The kinda travel I do, I prefer not to use data, so all I do is allow Reeder to sync my feeds on wifi at home before leaving to office and similarly before leaving to home. I am surprised by the amount of data it can sync and store. When run offline, it works flawlessly without complaining for data/network which is really cool . While offline I can either share on Google reader or favorite an article or mail an article with out any issues. Any other sharing features like sharing on twitter or Facebook or Instapaper or Evernote require Internet. Please note that when I mean offline the entire article (text and photo) is available for offline consumption, except for any embedded links which would only be available with Internet. So you get to consume a majority of the article, which is the best that is possible offline. All the changes like sharing, favorites etc are synced back on your next sync flawlessly. Reeder’s online capabilities are equally impressive. When the app is open, It syncs in the background and opens links within the app until you explicitly ask a link to be opened in safari. Besides there a a tonne of customization you can make to suit senses. In all Reeder is a must have app for your iDevice and is worth every penny. How I wish there was one for windows 🙂